AskAutoDoctor

Challenge

Independent automotive advice is a market with no neutral platform. Customers want a mechanic's opinion before a dealer touches the car; mechanics want a way to monetize expertise without running a shop; workshops want overflow demand. The platform had to bridge all three with consent-grade payment flows, scheduled sessions, and a compliance posture that closed enterprise workshop deals.

Approach

1. 01

   Designed a 4-role architecture — customer, mechanic, workshop, admin — with 100+ granular permissions enforced across the API surface.

2. 02

   Built a scheduled-session lifecycle from booking through join-state through payment release, with refund policy codified in code and SSOT'd for finance and ops.

3. 03

   Integrated Stripe with 40+ webhook event types, idempotent handlers, and reconciliation against the billing portal — zero critical payment incidents reported.

4. 04

   Built a 5-provider AI router (Claude, Groq, OpenAI, Cerebras, Anthropic) for diagnostic assistance with deterministic failover, claimed at 99.9% availability.

5. 05

   Shipped certification, brand-specialist filtering, exclusive-assignment logic, and a unified favorites system on top of the same SSOT.

Outcome

The platform consolidates a previously fragmented operating model into one product. Customers book and pay; mechanics deliver and get paid; workshops adopt the platform for overflow and certification. The engineering substrate handles thousands of concurrent users with sub-2-second loads.